News headlines in 2023, page 203

A new UK law affecting people’s rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, is “incompatible” with the country’s international obligations, the UN rights chief said on Thursday.

So-called “labour transfer” and “vocational training” programmes in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, threaten Tibetan cultural identity and could lead to forced labour conditions, UN independent human rights experts warned on Thursday.

NEW YORK, Apr 26 (IPS) - For the last five years, the United Nations Development Programme has worked with some of the world’s biggest producers of commodities like beef, soy, palm oil, and cocoa to protect livelihoods and the planet.In 2015, just over 30 cocoa farmers from Padre Abad in Ucayali, a province in the lush and ecologically diverse Peruvian Amazon, formed an alliance to tackle long-standing concerns such as soil quality, access to markets, fair prices for their produce and a growing number of illegal plantations. The result was the Colpa de Loros Cooperative, and from the start, the goal was to produce the finest quality, export-ready cocoa.

LOME, Togo, Apr 26 (IPS) - The writer is President, World Alliance for Mercury-Free DentistryThe Minamata Convention on Mercury, a stellar success story to date, has been favorably compared to the prototype success story for a treaty on toxins: the Montreal Protocol. Both had a single focused mission; both gained universal support across the globe; both matched technological innovation with environmental science to discard old polluting methods.

Around 90 per cent of adolescent girls and young women do not use the internet in low-income countries, while their male peers are twice as likely to be online, according to a new UNICEF analysis, coinciding with the UN’sInternational Girls in ICT Day.

One year after the General Assembly adopted its so-called “veto initiative”, Member States met on Wednesday to discuss how it could contribute to a more efficient and impact-oriented UN.

Survivors of one of the world’s worst ever nuclear accidents at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 have been reflecting on the events of that fateful day 37 years ago, as current employees consider the challenges of working at the plant which was seized by Russian troops following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The UN’s Special Representative for Sudan has called on the rival military factions which have plunged the country into chaos during 11 days of fighting to “fully adhere” to the agreed 72-hour ceasefire amid increasing concern at reports of inter-communal violence and attacks in the West Darfur region.

The rapidly deteriorating security situation in Haiti demands that the country remains at the centre of international attention and action, newly appointed UN Special Representative Maria Isabel Salvador said on Wednesday in her first briefing to the Security Council.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday launched a new initiative to help strengthen countries’ ability to plan for, and deal with, another deadly pandemic like COVID-19, as latest figures show a huge fall in COVID deaths this year.